Tag Archives: A picture is worth a thousand words

A picture is worth a thousand words.
So when using PowerPoint you should stick to fewer words and find that picture that says it all right? In PowerPoint it is possible to combine the picture and a word together. Wow that would mean that I would tell 2000 words with just one picture 🙂 Let’s see the possibilities PowerPoint has to offer using pictures, text and these two combined. Don’t worry you don’t have to be a designer (I’m not). This blog post will show you some simple techniques making your presentation looking stunning with just some simple adjustments. The picture on the left is a simple shape from PowerPoint filled with a picture of a flower I took with my camera.

Picture in the background of my text
All to often I see people copying and pasting images and text like their lives depend on it. It is possible to combine the two options in a very easy way. Example. We want the words Happy Holidays combined with a picture from the winter season. If possible add some extra effect and we should be fine. Here are the steps one could do. Remember I know there’s Photoshop and other applications out there that can do this more sophisticated. The goal however is to use just that what we have on hand and in this case it is PowerPoint.

Add a new empty slide to your presentation

Add the text Happy Holidays to the slide with the text box. Your slide should look something like this:

The next step is to add a picture to the text. To do so click on the text border. You should see 8 points around the text. If you see those you know that the text box is selected. Next click on the contextual tab in the ribbon (Drawing Tools). Do not be fooled to choose text fill but instead choose shape fill as shown below

Choose shape fill and from the menu choose Picture… Pick a location where your pictures reside and choose the appropriate picture. Click insert. For this example I chose a winter season picture

Now with the picture in place let’s adjust the font style. For this picture I set the font color to white. To do so click the text border once more making sure it is selected. Now click on the contextual tab and this time choose text fill to change the color of the text as shown below

Now for the next trick what i did was I copied the complete text box. This will give you a duplicate of the first text box. From the second text box remove the shapefill. You take the same steps you take when adding a shape fill but now choose ‘no shape fill’. This will leave you with the white text. Change the text to an appropriate color you like. The next step is to move the second text box ‘over’ the first text box. You can either do that by using the mouse or the keyboard Ctrl + arrow key up.

This will leave you with something like this:

So there you have it, text and picture combined!
Now the challenge… can you reproduce the same examples as show below?